Lens Focuses Light Without Distortion

For centuries, scientists and engineers have pushed the limits of materials to make better lenses. Inventions such as the Fresnel lens made lighthouses visible from further away and plastics made coke-bottle eyeglasses a thing of the past. Now a research team at Harvard has made another leap: a tiny cone-shaped lens that eliminate distortions in everything from cell phone cameras to ligh signals that travel through fiber optic cables.

Ultra-precise lenses are used in telecommunications to focus the beams in fiber-optic systems and in some cell phone cameras. Making them smaller and flatter frees up space and reduces the weight of devices. But existing solid lenses aren't distortion-free, however, and fixing that usually means using multiple lenses, which adds to weight and size.

Tilted 3-D Screens Coming Around The Bend

  

Whether for television or mobile devices, most 3-D displays have used autostereoscopic parallax barriers, such as liquid crystal displays, to give users a three-dimensional viewing experience.

However, a team of scientists, led by the University of Bristol, have chosen a different route. They've developed Tilt Displays, a new type of screen composed of nine smaller panels that physically tilt and contort to give the impression of depth.

Laser Beams Shoot from Printer

Lasers are everywhere -- in DVD players, fiber optic communications and even displays. They are so useful it would be great if they were flexible and easy to make, but that hasn't been the case, until now.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. have developed a way to print lasers on a variety of surfaces, using a printer not too far removed from the one on an average desktop.

The team, led by D. J. Gardiner of the Center for Molecular Materials for Photonics, used liquid crystals similar to those used in liquid crystal displays. With the right kind of stimulation, the molecules in liquid crystals emit laser light.